DREAMS OF THE GOOD LIFE: THE LIFE OF FLORA THOMPSON AND THE CREATION OF LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD BY RICHARD MABEY (Allen Lane £16.99)

Sugar-coated: Olivia Hallinan as Laura in the BBC's Lark Rise To Candleford

The author Flora Thompson was born in 1876 and grew up in the Oxfordshire village of Juniper Hill, a place so deeply rural that Oxford itself, only 19 miles away, seemed as remote as a foreign country.

She left school at 13, narrowly avoided going into domestic service - the common fate of girls of her class - and a year later went to work at the post office in a nearby village. Here she began noticing the quirks of local life that would blossom into Lark Rise To Candleford, the trilogy that has become one of the defining texts of pastoral England.

Biographer Richard Mabey points out an intriguing contradiction in her story: ‘Her fame comes from her commemoration of the virtues of traditional village life and people. Yet her own history consisted chiefly of an escape from this culture, and a hunger to become a different kind of person, a writer with her sights on the skies, not rutted in the agricultural vales.’ A yearning passage in Lark Rise describes how Laura (Flora’s narrator) is taught to read by her parents, who decide not to send her to school. The neighbours strongly disapprove of the sight of a child reading, and her mother tries to prevent it. ‘But as fast as one book was hidden away from her she found another, for anything in print drew her eyes as a magnet does steel’.

Laura’s voice is so sharply authentic that it is easy to forget that Flora originally intended her books to be published as novels.

The difficulty of writing her biography, Mabey admits, is that her books are almost the only clues to the intimate details of her life. She was a shy and rather solitary figure, happiest when observing. In her early 20s she moved to work for the post office at Grayshott, Hampshire, where, Mabey writes, ‘There was raffish literary company to be had, even for a postal assistant.’ A remarkable collection of writers, including Shaw, Doyle and Tennyson, converged on the area around Hindhead and Haslemere in the 1890s, and Grayshott was their local post office.

Shy and solitary: The real Flora

In Heatherley, Flora gives a description of her eminent customers almost as suffused with longing as her vignette of a little girl forbidden to read: ‘Some of them were brilliant conversationalists and it amused her to listen to their talk. She would sometimes wish that one of those quick, clever remarks they tossed like coloured glass balls into the air could have come her way, for in her youthful vanity she persuaded herself that she could have caught and returned it more neatly than someone to whom it was addressed.’

Mabey cannot hide his frustration at the ‘artistic modesty and social awkwardness’ that prevented Flora from introducing herself. But instead of joining the literary smart set, in 1901 she married John Thompson, a fellow postal worker. Previous biographers have assumed the unsatisfactory marriages in Flora’s novels meant her own was unhappy, but Mabey calls rumours that John discouraged her from writing ‘a myth’.

For a decade Flora set aside her literary dreams to concentrate on raising her three children. But in 1912 she found a mentor in the Scottish poet Ronald Campbell Macfie. He encouraged her to write, and their correspondence continued until his death in 1931. Alas for her biographer, most of her letters were burned after Macfie’s death by his friend, Lady Margaret Sackville, who remarked tartly that she ‘saw no point in keeping such rubbish’.

‘As a human being,’ Mabey writes sadly, ‘[Flora] remains strangely impenetrable. I would love to have found out whether, late in her life, she still spoke with an Oxfordshire accent, as she must have done in Juniper Hill; whether she was able to keep up her enthusiasm for chic fashion during the years of wartime austerity... These, alas, are not the kind of small, human details that Flora or anyone she knew bothered to put on permanent record.’

What he can do - with elegant clarity - is explore how Flora’s remarkable record of a world which was vanishing as she described it still haunts our collective imagination and informs our ideas of what it means to be English.

The small human details of Flora’s stories were somewhat sentimentalised by the popular BBC dramatisation, which strayed considerably from the harsh realities of life in Juniper Hill - the frightful earth closets whose malodorous half-yearly emptying ‘caused every door and window in the vicinity to be sealed’, and the poverty of the utterly destitute, such as the family of beggars Laura’s father once met, sheltering in a ditch. But they are there on every page of her books - and if we want to know about the real Flora, all we need to do is pick up Lark Rise and begin reading.

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Rural bliss? No, Lark Rise whiffed to high heaven: DREAMS OF THE GOOD LIFE: THE LIFE OF FLORA THOMPSON AND THE CREATION OF LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD BY RICHARD MABEY